“What can I say?” he said. “I unexpectedly got a second wind.”
They start walking south, first veering east from Broadway so they won’t have to cross through Times Square. Willem’s hair has been colored dark for his next role, and he has a beard, so he’s not instantly recognizable, but neither of them want to get stuck in a scrum of tourists.
This is the last time he will see Willem for what will likely be more than six months. On Tuesday, he leaves for Cyprus to begin work on The Iliad and The Odyssey; he will play Odysseus in both. The two films will be shot consecutively and released consecutively, but they will have the same cast and the same director, too. The shoot will take him all across southern Europe and northern Africa before moving to Australia, where some of the battle scenes are being shot, and because the pace is so intense and the distances he has to travel so far, it’s unclear whether he’ll have much time, if any, to come home on breaks. It is the most elaborate and ambitious shoot Willem has been on, and he is nervous. “It’s going to be incredible, Willem,” he reassures him.
“Or an incredible disaster,” Willem says. He isn’t glum, he never is, but he can tell Willem is anxious, and eager to do well, and worried that he will somehow disappoint. But he is worried before every film, and yet—as he reminds Willem—every one has turned out fine, better than fine. However, he thinks, this is one of the reasons that Willem will always have work, and good work: because he does take it seriously, because he does feel so responsible.
He, though, is dreading the next six months, especially because Willem has been so present for the last year and a half. First he was shooting a small project, one based in Brooklyn, that lasted just a few weeks. And then he was in a play, a production called The Maldivian Dodo, about two brothers, both ornithologists, one of whom is slowly tipping into an uncategorizable madness. The two of them had a late dinner every Thursday night for the entire run of the play, which he saw—as he has with all of Willem’s plays—multiple times. On his third viewing, he spotted JB with Oliver, just a few rows ahead of him but on the left side of the theater, and throughout the show he kept glancing over at JB to see if he was laughing at or concentrating on the same lines, aware that this was the first of Willem’s productions that the three of them hadn’t seen together, as a group, at least once.
“So, listen,” Willem says as they move down Fifth Avenue, which is empty of people, just bright-lit windows and stray bits of garbage twirling in the light, soft breeze—plastic bags, puffed up with air into jellyfish, and twists of newspaper—“I told Robin I’d talk to you about something.”
He waits. He has been conscious of not making the same mistake with Robin and Willem that he made with Philippa and Willem—when Willem asks him to accompany them anywhere, he makes sure that he’s cleared it with Robin first (finally Willem had told him to stop asking, that Robin knew how much he meant to him and she was fine with it, and if she wasn’t fine with it, she’d have to get fine with it), and he has tried to present himself to Robin as someone independent and not likely to move in with them when he’s old. (He’s not sure exactly how to communicate this message, however, and so is therefore unsure if he’s been successful or not.) But he likes Robin—she’s a classics professor at Columbia who was hired to serve as a consultant on the films two years ago, and she has a spiky sense of humor that reminds him of JB, somehow.
“Okay,” says Willem, and takes a deep breath, and he steadies himself. Oh no, he thinks. “Do you remember Robin’s friend Clara?”
“Sure,” he says. “The one I met at Clementine.”
“Yes!” says Willem, triumphantly. “That’s her!”
“God, Willem, give me some credit; it was just last week.”
“I know, I know. Well, anyway, here’s the thing—she’s interested in you.”
He is perplexed. “What do you mean?”
“She asked Robin if you were single.” He pauses. “I told her I didn’t think you were interested in seeing anyone, but I’d ask. So. I’m asking.”
The idea is so preposterous that it takes him a while to understand what Willem’s saying, and when he does, he stops, and laughs, embarrassed and disbelieving. “You’ve got to be kidding, Willem,” he says. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous?” asks Willem, suddenly serious. “Jude, why?”
“Willem,” he says, recovering himself. “It’s very flattering. But—” He winces and laughs again. “It’s absurd.”
“What is?” Willem says, and he can feel the conversation turn. “That someone should be attracted to you? This isn’t the first time this has happened, you know. You just can’t see it because you won’t let yourself.”
He shakes his head. “Let’s talk about something else, Willem.”
“No,” says Willem. “You’re not getting out of this one, Jude. Why is it ridiculous? Why is it absurd?”
He is suddenly so uncomfortable that he actually does stop, right on the corner of Fifth and Forty-fifth, and starts scanning the avenue for a cab. But of course, there are no cabs.
As he considers how to respond, he thinks back to a time a few days after that night in JB’s apartment, when he had asked Willem if JB had been correct, at least in some part: Did Willem resent him? Did he not tell them enough?